


Blasted

by Chiclet



Category: Kagaku Ninja Tai Gatchaman | Science Ninja Team Gatchaman
Genre: Angst, One Shot, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 20:10:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7728196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiclet/pseuds/Chiclet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owashi no Ken watches an empty ceremony and feels nothing. Which is, of course, as it should be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blasted

We won.

We won, you know. Doesn't mean a thing to you now, and it means even less to me. It's just words and they're gone before I finish saying them.

They're raising the guns, a full military honor for you when you hated the military. If you were here, you'd be laughing. At my shoulder with that smirk on your face, whispering something rude in my ear about where they could shove the empty casket. Waste of time you'd say, and you'd find a way to duck out.

I can't.

Even now, with the reason for it all scorched and gone, I'm still here and doing what they trained me to do. My duty to watch them fire guns you would have called pea shooters over our heads, let them fold the flag over a body that we couldn't find. Wait without any words at all while they lower a bronze sarcophagus that probably cost more than your back pay into the ground.

My last duty to stand here in the whites of victory and watch while they make your fall become the fall of everyone lost to the war. The unknown soldier, even though you had a name.

And soon enough they'll all know it but even that doesn't matter anymore. They can shout your name from the rooftops, but it will still mean nothing since there was always more in your silences.

Your legacy, your last gift to me. Blood on your lips, skin stained more than black with their malice, but it was the silence in your eyes that destroyed me. All the things you didn't say that tore me open, blasted me so clean that now I can stand here and feel absolutely nothing while they murder you again.

I'm free of all of it. I can't even bleed for you, because your hands were red enough for both of us.

What was it anyway? Almost ten years, or close enough since the start of it. All of it a battleground, start to finish, even if the rest of the world only saw the last bloody chapter. Ten years of discipline, indoctrination, and an exquisitely instilled fury. Ten years of shaping and moulding and polishing until we were suited for nothing else.

Me, perhaps most of all, but they did it to all of us. I watched and said nothing while they did it to you. Took your love and your rage and your passion for both and assembled you into a weapon with only one direction. You even saved them the trouble of figuring out what to do with the mess you were afterwards because you never came back.

I won't forget that, you know. That we won because you did exactly what they programmed you to do.

When the psychs get through with me, they'll hand me words like post traumatic stress and shell shock and combat neurosis. They'll give me drugs that I'll probably take for the depression they'll tell me I have, and I'll dutifully inform them of the nightmares that will keep me awake at night. And in a year or so, they'll declare me adjusted and sane and able to associate with the rest of my species again.

But I know and you know the truth.

I'm not human anymore.

And if you were alive, you wouldn't be either.


End file.
